SF parklets a homegrown effort

A community effort, as neighbors, friends and volunteers, help to put the finishing touches on the newly installed parklet in front of Farm: Table Restaurant on Post St. near Jones, on Saturday July 7, 2012, in San Francisco, Calif. Farm:Table Restaurant, used kickstarter to raise money to construct a parklet on the street in front of the business. less

A community effort, as neighbors, friends and volunteers, help to put the finishing touches on the newly installed parklet in front of Farm: Table Restaurant on Post St. near Jones, on Saturday July 7, 2012, in ... more

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

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A community effort, as neighbors, friends and volunteers, help to put the finishing touches on the newly installed parklet in front of Farm: Table Restaurant on Post St. near Jones, on Saturday July 7, 2012, in San Francisco, Calif. Farm:Table Restaurant, used kickstarter to raise money to construct a parklet on the street in front of the business. less

A community effort, as neighbors, friends and volunteers, help to put the finishing touches on the newly installed parklet in front of Farm: Table Restaurant on Post St. near Jones, on Saturday July 7, 2012, in ... more

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

SF parklets a homegrown effort

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San Francisco's 2-year-old parklet effort, where parking spaces are reborn as miniature public plazas, has attracted media attention and been emulated in cities from Adelaide, Australia, to Philadelphia.

But as eight volunteers on Saturday shoveled dirt from a downtown sidewalk into a low-slung frame of angled wood and steel, another aspect of parklets was on display: They're summoned into existence not from the top down, but the bottom up.

"We'll put in grass seeds after we finish with painting," said Luke Stewart, who lives above Farm:Table cafe, sponsor of the parklet being installed outside the cafe at 754 Post St. "It's almost like working on an art project rather than building a front deck."

The 35-foot-long, 6-foot-deep space is among the most ambitious of the 31 parklets that have been installed since the first platform with seating replaced a pair of parking spaces on Divisadero Street in March 2010. The outer walls are steel; the interior's cedar surface slides and twists in eye-catching patterns that also form planter edges and seating.

The undulations serve a practical purpose as well, one that responds both to lessons learned at early parklets and to Farm:Table's location on the border between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill.

'Not a giant lounge chair'

"It's not a giant lounge chair," said Zoë Prillinger of Ogrydziak/Prillinger Architects, which designed the parklet on a pro bono basis. "The idea was to create something comfortable, but not so comfortable you want to be there all day."

That's only one of the balancing acts involved in what Governing magazine last month dubbed "the latest trend in urban placemaking."

Some early parklets were criticized for being little more than glorified cafe seating; others attracted indigents during the day and revelers at night. There's a need to make the spaces accessible to wheelchair users, but also a desire to encourage designs that offer attractions beyond bare platforms with metal railings and a row of tables and chairs.

Yet there's no denying the success of the program, which allows two parking spaces to be converted into an accessible public space. Each parklet is sponsored by a business or community group, which pays for the construction and maintenance.

A parklet on California Street near Fillmore Street has sleek LED lighting at night, while one on Mission Street in the Excelsior is adorned with painted wooden cutouts done by high school students. At the parklet outside Devil's Teeth Baking Co. on Noriega Street, three blocks from Ocean Beach, sand-colored bunch grass swirls in the Pacific breeze.

Change ahead

Planners now are pondering how to change parklets from isolated spaces - urbane nooks and crannies, so to speak - into something more systematic. Several could be concentrated on a single block, for instance, or a half dozen could map a path through a neighborhood.

"Any proposal to do something in the street was met with such resistance" before the parklets experiment began, said David Alumbaugh, director of the Planning Department's city design group. "Now they're popular, and it's 'Why not do more?' "

At the same time, the parklet emerging on Post Street shows the importance of having local residents bring a space to life, rather than simply providing input to city planners.

The cost of the platform and its landscape is likely to approach $25,000 by the time all work is done, more than twice the parklet norm. To close the gap beyond what Farm:Table could pay, supporters held fundraising events and turned to social media - raising $15,327 from 186 backers on Kickstarter, an effort that concluded in April. Construction began in May.

Volunteer effort

The volunteer effort Saturday included neighbors who stop by Farm:Table regularly but also like the idea of a sliver of open space in a dense patch of the city.

"It's going to be a green space, but also a space to enjoy a wonderful day like today," said Teri Gardiner, a graphic designer who lives at the corner of Post and Leavenworth streets, as she was shoveling dirt into a rickety wheelbarrow.

Mark Rutledge lives on the next block of Post. Asked the last time he had wielded a shovel in the sun, Rutledge paused, then laughed.

"A couple of years ago, I was back home doing some stuff for my mom," said the software company employee, who grew up in Dallas. "It's not my regular thing."